During a House Natural Resources Committee hearing prior to the congressional recess, Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-OR) spoke about funding for Tribal communities.
00:00from Oregon is now recognized for our five minutes.
00:02Thank you, Mr. Chair.
00:03And I echo my colleagues' sentiments here that this is an issue that I believe is bipartisan
00:10in our desire to address.
00:12And I would also just reiterate that this is the fourth time that we've asked our tribal
00:16partners to come and testify, and yet we continue to cut your funding.
00:21So on that, I just want to say that we cannot just be words.
00:28We have to truly partner, and Mr. Hilaire, I appreciate, or Chairman Hilaire, I'm sorry,
00:34I appreciate you're so clearly outlining what you are looking for in your testimony.
00:41That's extremely helpful.
00:43The chronic underfunding of tribal communities, despite our trust and treaty obligations, is
00:49clearly a broken promise in my mind.
00:52And the grant funding programs that Mr. Roberge, I think, really spoke to, you know, may be
01:00great opportunities, but my guess is that you don't have the resources to competitively apply
01:05for those resources.
01:07So I just want to ask you to please describe how you would use full funding for law enforcement
01:16in particular, and acknowledging that you've outlined it, just give you an opportunity to
01:22really highlight what the most important aspects of your testimony are and why culturally appropriate
01:28and competent law enforcement is important on our tribal nations.
01:34Yeah, yeah, thank you for that question.
01:40And I do just want to reiterate that and agree, you know, our perception and our understanding of treaty
01:52and trust responsibility is not just applying for a grant, especially competitively.
01:58We don't want to compete against our brothers and sisters across Indian country to get the services
02:04and the work that's needed and what was promised to us in the Point Elliott Treaty of 1855.
02:13And so that's one portion of it, and that's why this idea and this concept of the Indian Self-Determination
02:22and Education Assistance Act is needed.
02:26There's some much-needed expansion of self-governance across various agencies in government.
02:33And to go to your question, I think that includes Department of Justice, the Homeland Security, and so on,
02:40because it doesn't just sit within one agency or one program or one federal opportunity that we have
02:48to get what we need to take care of our people and address the serious issues that we face.
02:53And so if we were to have the full funding for, at least for us at Lummi Nation, we have our own courts and judicial system,
03:03and that's why I brought up the special attorney to the U.S. attorney to have the ability to prosecute federally
03:09within our own judicial system would go a long way.
03:12And then also having full capacity of our enforcement officers, we've become a training ground for officers that come in and are new,
03:22and we don't have competitive wages or retirement to other local jurisdictions around us.
03:28And so they come in and learn Lummi law.
03:31They learn local ordinances.
03:33They learn state law.
03:35And then they learn federal law.
03:36And then they move on to what's next.
03:39And so that's a huge issue.
03:42And then also what we learned in addressing the immediate overwhelming amount of fatal overdoses is the importance of drug checkpoints
03:53to slow down the amount of traffic of drugs on a reservation.
03:57And with that, it was a tremendous help to have our own canine unit team there to help with that work.
04:05And then not necessarily it's indirectly impacted by funding is the support from the BIA agents and FBI in our region.
04:15It's very limited.
04:17And it took constant calls and meetings to be able to have enforcement BIA agents on our reservation to do these much-needed drug interdictions.
04:28And in our debrief, it was stated from them and the DEA that the solution is to keep doing them.
04:35But then we're going to wait until more people die, or are we going to have a plan in place that is needed so we can do it more regularly?
04:44And that does take funding.
04:46No, I appreciate that.
04:47And, Mr. Chairman, I want to acknowledge we don't have very much time left, but I would really appreciate highlighting the importance of having culturally competent folks investing time and funding and treatment for addiction and recovery.
05:04And you spoke to the desire to bring that to the Lummi Nation.
05:09And so I was wondering if you could extrapolate or expand on that a little bit.
05:13Yeah, yeah, exactly.
05:14So we're doing a full-court press, and in addressing the fentanyl crisis and getting drugs off of the street, we saw just an overwhelming amount of individuals that wanted to seek help and address addiction and address cycles of trauma and cycles of abuse.
05:34And so with that, we have done everything we can to prioritize these much-needed services.
05:43The stabilization facility, we're building a secure withdrawal management and stabilization facility, otherwise known as DETOX, just opened a state-of-the-art tribal health care facility.
05:55And all of these healing health services have culture at the very, very core and center of it, our way of life, our teachings, our values.
06:05And that's integrated throughout everybody's journey to wellness, their pathway, because everybody's pathway is different.
06:11But having our culture at the very center of it has really, really shown us our ability to take care of ourselves.
06:19No, I very much appreciate that.
06:20And I'll acknowledge, Mr. Chair, that I went over a bit.
06:23I just want to elevate the importance of building a health care system that is not just impactful, but sustained, and that we need to meet our treaty obligations and have that reliable funding for that to happen.
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